The First Sphere -- the Man on the Moon

2004-03-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

Having proven himself a chemist in his understanding of the principles by which helium works on air in the previous canto, Dante now proves himself an astronomer in his explanation of how the moon is marked -- while he was right in the Convivio in following Avicenna's idea (remember, he's the Muslim that Dante puts in Limbo with the virtuous pagans) that there were depressions on the moon's surface, he has Beatrice explain the situation in the first nod to Aquinine scholasticism by explaining away the dichotomy used by human reason through a method of positing the ideas and then objecting to them before interpreting the truth. The truth is, in fact, quite wrong, but Beatrice's explanation serves Dante the Poet's spiritual cosmos, for a perfect heavenly sphere cannot have blemishes, so any imperfections in man's perception of the sphere have to deal with the differing ways in which heavenly light plays on the surface of a perfect orb. Score one for the cosmos -- perfectly Ptolomaic and perfectly Christian.

That the spheres are perfect reflections of divine light is amply illustrated in this idea of the moon as a perfect reflective orb, but there's more to it -- the analogy calls all of us to be likewise, as St. Hesychius of Jerusalem exhorted us -- "Keep yourselves free from sin so that every day you may share in the mystic meal; by doing so our bodies become the body of Christ." The greater end of doing so, Aristotle tells us, is found in the pursuit of the good of the community, or body politic, and certainly we've seen this in our journey through the Inferno and Purgatorio as the former is a demonstration of the disintegration of community and the latter is a demonstration of its reintegration. Here in heaven, we see that ideal of community as a self-evident fact just as reason gives way to implicit understanding.

S.

Heaven: Canto 2 -- The First Heaven: The Moon

The First Sphere -- the Man on the Moon